A bright multicoloured digital collage with objects flying out from the centre including a CD, pieces of paper, a small glove and a bar of soap.

Matrices and Communities:
FACT Together 2022-2023

'Rest Rooms' (2023) by Ellie Towers. Image courtesy of the artist.

Responsible for supporting eighteen digital artworks since 2020, FACT Together offers artists living in the North of England a three-month residency with mentoring support and a combined fee and production budget of £4000 to develop their ideas into digital work. The four artists selected were Ellie Towers, Dongni Liang, Nicole Prior and Charlotte Southall who responded to the theme of togetherness across physical and digital platforms.

The works are displayed upstairs on the first floor outside Gallery 2. Four screens lined up in a row are fitted with headphones for audio and include subtitles for accessibility. Still images from each work are pasted on the wall behind them. Each work is also available online through FACT’s website. Because these works are inherently digital this method of display does work, but given that the programme theme wishes to address both physical and digital platforms it would have been interesting to see them exhibited in a gallery with additional installation elements. The digital artworks featured in this review are available to explore online at fact.co.uk/fact-together.

Ellie Towers’ ‘Rest Rooms’ (2023) is a forty-minute film which combines digital rendering with hand-drawn imagery, clay models, stop-motion animation and a beautiful soundtrack which accompanies a subtitled narrative. Seeking to explore the complex relationships we share with public and private spaces, specifically through the lens of play and imagination, it begins with a dialogue recollecting a misremembered video game from childhood which can no longer be played. The speakers try to recall what it was like and realise the only way to play it now is through memory. From a bedroom we are carried through a computer monitor to a pavilion which a hand-drawn moon smiles down upon. We are now in the ‘Rest Rooms’, an imaginative, liminal space which invites viewers to spend their time in Towers’ speculative projection of nostalgia, a mnemonic landscape of bright melting colours which hark back to the children’s TV shows of the Noughties.

From here the video continues to explore spaces and their stories: we are shown glass rats and pigeons, taken through the process of embalming a body and introduced to the illusive, faceless character of the Caretaker. The soundtrack – produced by Joe Goff – features relaxing, tinkly game world sounds which crescendo into synths that blare like a ship’s horn and cut into amplified whispering as the video plays out. The result is an atmosphere of anxious voyeurism, a peculiar juxtaposition which leaves you feeling like you’re intruding on someone’s private thoughts despite having been invited.

The imagery of this piece exudes the style evoked by the N64 games of the 2000s, running through mazes with no clear purpose and up staircases which never end – a metaphor for the retrospective exploration in adulthood of childhood experiences. It serves as a reminder that what we find when we look back is not necessarily always what it seems or what we think it will be, and how the places we return to may not be the same as we remembered them.

A digital rendering of a huge dark building in below a ghostly blank sky. It could be a factory or a prison. A smaller warehouse-like building to the left, and tiny cars visible on the carpark.
‘Kudzu Whispers’ (2023) by Dongni Liang. Image courtesy of the artist.

The second piece is Dongni Liang’s video work, ‘Kudzu Whispers’ (2023). Kudzu, also known as Chinese or Japanese arrowroot, is a vine native to much of East Asia. Introduced to America as an ornamental plant in the 1880s to decorate the antebellum porches of the southeast states, it is now considered an invasive weed in the western states.

This piece is a triptych of videos, on the work’s website titled as ‘Resurrection’, ‘Anima’ and ‘Transplant’, displayed in the gallery on a loop on a main screen, accompanied by a smaller reading screen where a contemplative narrative written from the perspective of the kudzu plant itself is displayed. The first, ‘Resurrection’, features digitally-rendered videos of kudzu vines growing and encompassing the buildings of Stanley Dock in Liverpool, while historical images of Chinese farmers and adverts of agricultural products imported from China appear on the small screen. The second takes us to a fairy-tale-esque marsh with glistening pools of clear water and hills protruding from an endless ocean where kudzu thrives and blue butterflies perch in the rapidly growing greenery. The third superimposes the two together, displaying a speculative future where nature and urban life coexist without destroying each other; a healthy, mutually beneficial symbiosis.

This work considers togetherness from the perspective of being apart, displaced from a point of origin and alienated due to an inability to adapt to a new environment. The kudzu considers its roots both physical and metaphorical, frequently, and the accompanying notion of being physically uprooted and planted elsewhere: ‘I belong to the land, but this land is not my home.’

We are gifted the viewpoint of the vine’s consciousness as it daydreams of a future where nature is free from cultivation and repossesses the landscape. The plant dreams of the downfall of its primary enemy: the mass commodification of plant life in a capitalist economy, in which kudzu’s lack of use value means it must be destroyed.

Nicole Prior’s ‘LAB_our’ (2023), a website and digital installation, invites the audience through an interactive screen in the gallery to ‘Donate your digital self’ by filling out a survey of personal identification options. Taking this data, the work claims to create an avatar which acts as a simplified copy of the viewer’s self who is uploaded into a digital copy of a typical British retail high street, filled with the glitchy shopfronts of Schuh and Next, where crowds of the audience’s doubles potter about in the artificial daylight.

Posing as critical mimicry of the practice of nonconsensual data collection and manipulation, ‘LAB_our’ plays into the twenty-first century angst of constant surveillance. The modern-day experience of always being seen and listened to, all our personal information filed for targeted advertising, is played on in Prior’s website. Fake spam pop-ups ask: do you want ice cream, what’s your music preference, and, are you single?

I have to admit, however, that it is difficult to feel whether the audience’s contribution has any effect on the piece. Once the survey is submitted it is unclear where or who your avatar is, which for me made the piece in the end feel unrewarding. It is difficult to understand the impact my contribution made and whatever the message the work wants to convey is gets lost in the process. I wonder whether a prior avatar display, showing an image of the digital self you have created, or perhaps a stats bar which shows their personality traits according to marketability and where they are most likely to shop, would communicate the work’s intention more clearly. Perhaps it is the artist’s intention to directly mimic how data is used in real life, without our knowledge, and with a purpose we can’t predict. However, I think it would be more interesting if we were presented with a concise display of how the data we contribute affects our avatars existence and, in doing so, our own.

Four screens which show glitchy digital versions of CCTV footage in urban, outdoor spaces. Bottom left is a bus stop, and top right a huge billboard.
‘LAB_our’ (2023) by Nicole Prior. Image courtesy of the artist.

Charlotte Southall’s ‘The Perfect Influence’ (2023), features a video of a digital clone of the artist, named SkinnyChip2, who repeats a loop of phrases over five minutes. The text is generated from a chatbot’s interaction with advertising data and influencer-speak sourced from Instagram. The physical work also features stickers, nail files, ‘sold-out’ t-shirts, pens that don’t work and a pamphlet from the imaginary ‘Magazine’ issue, the internet’s new it girlie.

The pamphlet features an interview between SkinnyChip2 and chatGPT, meant, I think, to highlight how the information age is shepherding human interaction towards collectivisation and the loss of the individual through the constant consumption of media. It has a QR code which leads to a virtual conference where Miis (the avatars from Wii games) discuss the unpredictability of human beings on social media and how this makes it difficult to follow and predict market trends. The Perfect Influencer is revealed as the solution to this problem, eliminating human error via businesses’ direct ability to control content production through them.

The work highlights that the stardom of social media and its subsequent influencers are creating a culture in which our desires are being led to imitation. Thus our capability to make decisions, think critically and know who we are get morphed. The overall tone is heavily sardonic, making a show of the fact that a programme can perform the same function as a human being and a cautionary foreshadowing of the potential future of social media.

In the midst of a cost of living crisis, the theme of togetherness, I believe, is massively relevant. Each work talked about here addresses a way in which technology and the digital realm (be it video games, data collection or influencer culture) have a profound effect on our day-to-day lives and the development of our character and therefore culture. These artworks speculate about what the ever-closing gap between the physical and digital can do, what the potential future effect of the information age could have on us as human beings as societies, and how we will go on to communicate and exist both as individuals and together. The works ask what it is that draws us together or turns us away from one another, and prompt us to question how we continue to learn to live with each other.

Fact Together 2022-2023, FACT, Liverpool, 8 September – 26 November 2023. The works can be explored online at FACT’s website.

Reece Griffiths is an artist and writer based in Liverpool.

This review is supported by FACT.

Published 28.09.2023 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews

1,606 words